“Will you kill me?”
I blinked, and swallowed hard. “Kill you?”
“Yes.” It took a step forward awkwardly, and then stopped. “If I help you to enter the Abbey, will you kill me?” With apparent effort, it spread its hands.
Glancing around the room, I found no one willing to look me in the eye, no one willing to offer even an unspoken opinion. Finally I made fists with both hands and looked back at the Monk.
“Done.”
The Monk didn’t move at first. Then it nodded its head, once, the motors humming. “Done.”
XX
IT HURT MY EYES A LITTLE JUST TO LOOK AT HER
“Well, this is depressing.”
I ignored Gatz. He was the only one I thought I could count on to at least not slit my throat. Kieth intended me no harm, I thought, but he wouldn’t lose sleep if I got hurt, either; I wasn’t even sure he regarded other people as people, and not as especially well-designed Droids. Milton and Tanner were in it purely for the money, and people in it for the money could never be trusted.
That left Kev Gatz.
We stood on the Dole Line near Downing Street with every other citizen of the System. A few blocks back were the twisted remnants of a heavy-duty black metal gate, half of it torn from its moorings and the other half melted. I twisted my head and could see a jagged wall of masonry still standing on Downing Street itself, just inside those gates, where a small sign was amazingly clean and uncharred, reading DOWNING STREET, SW1, CITY OF WESTMINSTER. I considered asking when the fuck London had been the City of Westminster, and then considered my companions and decided against it. The Abbey was called Westminster, too, and the Abbey had looked like the oldest fucking thing in the world, so maybe it had been a long time ago, fifty years or forever.
I imagined some of the people on the line-snaking for miles up and down the street several times before disappearing-were actually waiting for their issue of Nutrition Tabs and Necessities Coupons, sponsored by several of the richer families in London, but the Dole Line was really just a meeting place. Most of us were there looking to make deals, usually illegal. You had the cream of London’s underground standing around in broad daylight, so despised by their betters that no one paid any attention.
I was looking for guns.
Just a mile away our target sat behind a high wall and the security system: Westminster Abbey, Worldwide Headquarters of the Electric Church. The Abbey itself was largely gone, carried away by Unification and riots and the simple erosion of a population so desperate that ancient bricks became valuable. All that was left was one wall and most of one tower, upright by the grace of God or whatever, the new wall around it a cinder-block monstrosity.
I followed Gatz at a leisurely pace. He was working the line, making inquiries after a gun dealer Kieth recommended. I didn’t have any contacts in London, so I took the advice offered and hoped for the best. It was a gray, rainy sort of day, a steady drizzle of subtle dispirited precipitation that soaked your clothes before you realized it.
I had Brother West in my head, the poor fuck. I’d had people plead with me not to kill them. I’d never had someone beg me to pull his plug. I was happy to take Dick Marin’s money, I was happy to kill whomever he wanted me to in return for what he’d offered me, what did I care? But listening to West, I’d realized it really was true. Inside every Monk there was a human being silently screaming in digital, with no mouth.
I followed Gatz, my hands in my pockets, my best hardassed mask on, staring at the Monks. A gang of them worked the Dole Line. They smiled their way up and down, politely asking if anyone wanted to hear their personal testimony. They got a few takers, thin, pale men and women with deep, blank eyes who probably thought that if they joined the EC they wouldn’t have to stand in line for a whole day just to get some super-rich asshole’s version of charity. The Monks were all immaculate. Clean, polished, calm, polite, well-spoken, but every time I looked at them I saw a scream. I made fists inside my pockets and wanted to rip each latex face off.
“Ave,” Gatz said, gesturing me closer. “This guy knows our man.”
I stepped forward. Gatz was standing with a short, gaunt, completely toothless man who sported a thin line of drool out of the corner of his mouth. He grinned at me and I wanted to punch him just to make him stop.
“You know Jerry Materiel?” I asked.
Drooly nodded slowly. “Shure, shure,” he lisped. “He’s on line right now, doin’ bizness. I could point ’im out to you for, say, five yen.”
I stared at him, keeping my hardassed mask on. I felt Gatz glance at me through his glasses.
“You want I should give him a nudge?” he asked.
I bunched my jaw muscles. “No,” I said firmly. There were rules, or ought to be. Or had been, once. If you just fucked everyone you met, fucked and fucked and fucked people, where did it end? The man had made an honest offer. I fished a credit dongle from my pocket. “Five it is, friend, on delivery.”
Drooly nodded happily, spittle flying, and broke away from the line. We followed him for about two minutes, an endless, featureless line of desperate people passing us, most engaged in furtive discussions, some making exchanges. The city around us looked desolate and abandoned, and incredibly ancient. On the horizon was a tall, broken tower that soared upward and ended in jagged, black-char teeth. The whole place felt like the riots had ended twenty years ago, and everyone had just left it as it was-every stone on the street, every destroyed building, every evacuated family-all just collecting dust all these years. It was a ghost city. Drooly stopped in front of a group of men who looked a little too well-fed for the Dole Line and pointed.
“Here’s Jer,” Drooly sputtered. “Wit’ the broken nose.”
I ignored Drooly’s outstretched palm and stepped up to the group. One of them did have a prodigiously broken nose, sitting at a noticeable angle to his face. I nodded at him. “You Jerry Materiel?”
He looked me and Gatz up and down. “Mabe, who’el you, den?”
His accent was so thick I could barely understand him. Sifting through the mangled syllables, I squinted until I thought I looked inscrutable and deadly. It had worked before. “Avery Cates, out of New York.”
He studied me for a moment, and then grunted. I knew enough about people like Jerry to determine this meant he’d heard my name. “Bawl ov chawlk, lads, eh?” The men who had been standing with him drifted a few feet away, smoking cigarettes and talking. The cigarettes marked them as fairly prosperous crooks; it had been weeks since I’d had a steady supply of smokes.
“Cates outter New Yawk, awright,” Jerry Materiel grunted, looking me up and down again. “I heard you Captain Kirked the Kendish hit. That you?”
Kendish… I thought a moment, and then brightened. Mitchell Kendish had been a Joint Council undersecretary. He’d launched an investigation into a group stealing SSF laundry hovers and tearing them apart, selling the parts right back to the SSF to repair the remaining hovers. It had been genius, but Kendish had spoiled everything. The undersecretaries, who were the people who did most of the day-to-day real work of running the System, can usually be bribed-they were the worst in the whole damn filthy System, worse even than the System Cops because they didn’t have a Department of Internal Affairs to keep track of them and meddle once in a while.
What made the whole insane machine run was bribes, really. No matter how corrupt and broken the machine was, everyone could rely on the magical power of yen and that stabilized things. But Kendish hadn’t wanted anything to do with a bribe. So I’d been hired to put him away. I didn’t mind; you didn’t get to be an undersecretary by being a saint, and the price was right. That had been my most high-profile job-and one of the few that had gone off without a hitch, professional and dry, no mess. I thought longingly of the money I’d been paid for that. Long gone, into Pickering’s, into a lot of bullshit. “Yeah, I poked Kendish.”